#5 — Nathan Barry, founder of ConvertKit

Li Jin and Nathan Baschez interview Nathan Barry--creator, author, speaker, designer, and the founder of ConvertKit. He founded ConvertKit in 2013 as an email marketing company for creators, with the goal of helping more people make money online. The company has been bootstrapped to $23.5M in ARR and has over 31K customers.

Nathan got his start in the passion economy almost 10 years ago, when he launched a series of books for web and mobile designers. Then, he set his sights on creating a SaaS product. The natural place to begin was scratching his own itch, so he decided to build an email marketing platform for creators.

We’re excited to talk to Nathan about his experience growing ConvertKit, his analysis of where passion economy is headed, and his advice for creators trying to build an audience and a business. 

We interview Nathan on:
- Why he started ConvertKit, and how the vision has changed since launch
- In a recent tweet, Nathan argued that paid newsletters were a much more difficult path to get to $100k in revenue than courses and books
- Deciding to go horizontal or vertical when building for creators
- Comparing and contrasting ConvertKit and Substack
- Renaming ConvertKit to Seva, and back again
- His 3 business philosophies: Teach everything you know, create every day, and work in public⁠

Brought to you by Li Jin and Nathan Baschez of the Everything bundle.

Related links:
everything.substack.com
meansofcreation.substack.com
nathanbarry.com

Show theme music: Compassion by Stefan Kartenberg